Link back to comment

Thanks Noel. The academic talk about ‘whiteness’ is a crock of incoherent nonsense. An article on the University of Calgary’s ‘Anti-Racism Education’ website says:

‘In our experience we have found that when people refer to "white people" (either in self-identification or identifying individuals/groups), it is in fact being used as a shorthand reference to whiteness’ (https://www.ucalgary.ca/cared/whiteness)

Got that? If you say ‘person x is a white person’, you are in fact saying she/he/ze has the property of ‘whiteness’. I hope that has clarified things (one of innumerable examples of circular reasoning that abound in this field – see the article by Zanuttini I cited above https://areomagazine.com/2017/06/16/racism-does-not-equal-prejudice-power/).

The article then cites another ‘scholar’ who says:

‘Racism is based on the concept of whiteness—a powerful fiction enforced by power and violence. Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white’

So here we have a ‘fiction’ that, despite being fictional, is powerful and violent.
… and on and on it goes. Bizarro World stuff.